Saturday, October 25, 2014

I haven't blogged much over the last few days. We are currently involved in moving my ninety-one year old mother into an assisted living facility in Montreal. For today, all I wish to say is that, while cancer is a viscous disease, and diabetes is a horrific disease, the most tragic disease is the one that results in the body outliving the mind.

I will be back in -- hopefully -- at a not too distant date. There is plenty to write about.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Andrew Coyne is a philosophical and an economic conservative. So one would expect that he would support the present government. But he saw through the facade long ago. Despite his conservative bias, he has very little good to say about the Harper government:

If the nastiness of its politics is the dominant impression of this
government, it is in part for lack of anything else to identify it. It
seems so pointless, all this poisonous effort for so little actual
accomplishment, until you realize that is the point: The partisanship is
in place of the policy, not in pursuit of it. The end is only power,
and power is, with few exceptions, the only thing of consequence this
government has achieved.

Coyne sees the government's critics as inconsequential -- a judgement that will either prove valid or invalid. Nonetheless, Coyne writes:

It is the belief in this government’s consequentiality that, oddly,
unites its critics and its friends. Much of that, I think, is bound up
in the prime minister’s persona. Foes see a ruthless revolutionary;
fans, a sober-sided, get ’er done chief executive, capable of making, as
a Globe story put it recently, the “tough decisions.” He seems a
formidable character, for good or ill: It is hard to believe that all
that intelligence and self-discipline could not be in the service of
some larger purpose, or at least some grander strategic design. Even
dispassionate observers like Maclean’s magazine’s Paul Wells, in The
Longer I’m Prime Minister, attribute to him a vast, if incremental,
efficacy: so incremental it eludes the naked eye.

That judgment has always seemed -- to me, at least -- weak minded. Harper is a Canadian version of the Wizard Oz. If he's been successful, it's because he has been allowed by an apathetic public to operate behind a curtain. And he does his best to keep the curtain drawn.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Canada’s parliament is now a damp squib, a meek handmaid to power.
Parliament is ruled by the prime minister and the cabinet , not the
other way around. Conservative MPs see themselves as obedient servants
of the party, cabinet and prime minister, not representatives of their
constituents.

You could call it “executive or presidential democracy.” It certainly is the polar opposite of parliamentary democracy.

Certainly, Rathgeber has witnessed that decline -- particularly in the last eight years. He writes:

“The current government prefers to govern by order-in-council and
executive edict as opposed to having to answer to an occasionally
meddlesome Parliament,” Rathgeber writes. “As a result, the executive
has so neutered the institutions of Parliament as to render them nearly
impotent, practically unable to fulfill their constitutional duty to
hold the executive to account…(T)o the greatest extent possible, it
prefers to run all aspects of Parliament rather than be accountable to
it.”

Living next door to the United States, we have adopted a presidential model of leadership:

The most corrosive and dangerous development in Canada’s fully
Americanized parliamentary system is the highly centralized power of the
PMO and cabinet with a majority government. Add the now-complete
stifling of the rights of ordinary MPs to say or do anything on their
own, and Canada has degenerated into a virtual dictatorship.

And that’s without including the ability of the prime minister to prorogue, recess and dissolve parliament at whim.

And no one can claim that the trend is present in all parliamentary democracies:

Compare this sorry state of affairs to the parliamentary system in place
in Britain and Australia, Canada’s sister parliamentary democracies.
“(British Prime Minister) Margaret Thatcher was deposed by her own
caucus, and twice in the last four years the Australia Labour Party has
rejected a leader (and prime minister) and then rejected the replacement
on the will of the caucus,” Rathgeber writes. “This is normal; this is
parliamentary democracy as it should be, where the leader leads the
caucus but does not dominate it. The aforementioned Westminster
democracies, which have not fallen prey to creeping presidentialism ,
are thought to be much more functional by academics…”

It's quite clear that Stephen Harper would be quite comfortable with the monikers "Mr. President" and "Commander-in-Chief." And that's precisely why he needs to be thrown out of office in the next election.

We'll be in Montreal for the next couple of days. My plan is to resume blogging on Monday.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Paul Adams writes that Stephen Harper is now Bashar Assad's newest ally. The coalition he has joined strengthens Assad's hand:

Most obviously, it strikes directly at the most potent rebel force
that rose up in opposition to his regime — the one that has acquired the
most territory and has the strongest fighting force.

By targeting Islamic State, it allows Assad to divert military
resources to fight other rebel groups, including the al-Qaida linked
Al-Nusra Front and the so-called ‘moderate’ rebels we supposedly
support.

The anti-Islamic State mission also creates a diplomatic opening for
Assad to begin rehabilitating his regime from pariah state to unlikely
Western ally.

And Adams offers a few facts for comparison:

The U.S. government recently said
that Islamic State had abducted between 1,500 and 4,000 Yazidi women,
some of whom were apparently sold as “brides”. That’s awful — but how
does it compare with the record of the Assad regime?

Although it’s notoriously difficult to assemble statistics on sexualized violence, there is substantial evidence
that the Assad regime has used rape as a weapon, and on a scale yet to
be matched by Islamic State. It also has a ghastly record of torturing
and murdering civilians — including children.

Best estimates of the number of people killed in Assad’s war so far are
in the neighbourhood of 300,000. The number killed by Islamic State to
date may be in the tens of thousands.

None of this means that Islamic State is a victim. They are beyond the pale. The question is: Is the Harper mission the solution to the problem? Past history suggests it isn't. But Stephen Harper is no student of history -- even recent history.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Stephen Harper has been traveling the country, announcing tax breaks. So you know the election campaign is on. But the real proof that Mr. Harper is in campaign mode, Michael Harris writes, is that the three cornerstones of Harperism are now firmly in place - fable, fear and smear:

Fables are comforting tales with few details. And, if there is one thing Mr. Harper doesn't want Canadians to look at, it's the devil in the details:

With the Canada-Europe CETA deal — which remains a work in progress, no matter how
many press releases they’ve issued — we’re told that Canada’s GDP will
go up 32 per cent. No mention in that bald prediction of who will
benefit, or what it will cost. How many subsidies will the federal
government have to pay to people like cheese producers? How much will
seniors end up paying for their pharmaceuticals if the Europeans get
their way? Judging from his past performance, Harper’s deals will be
good for the five-carat wedding ring set. For lesser mortals, it will
come down to a chicken-wing in every pot.

Then, of course, there is Harper's newly minted war in Iraq, which is being fueled by fear:

That same mainstream media (with notable individual exceptions,
including the intrepid Canadian Press) is endorsing Harper’s view that
Canadians are in imminent danger of being beheaded at the outlet mall by
Islamic State. Man-eating pythons rising up from the toilet bowl pose
more of a direct threat.

And, finally, there is the attempt to smear Justin Trudeau -- which has apparently been outsourced to Jason Kenny:

Jason Kenney is apparently spending 20 per cent of his time whipping the shiny new pony on Twitter. Kenney’s staff is in on the act but the minister assures us they do the work on their personal time. (They would never kick the pony during working hours because that would be … well, that would be dirty pool, right?)

The whole idea is to sow seeds of doubt about Trudeau's judgment. But, that tactic could well backfire. It might cause voters to take a second look at Harper's judgment:

As for trashing Justin Trudeau for being inexperienced or having poor judgement — does Harper really
want to go there? A debate about judgement? Does he really want to
revisit all his least statesmanlike moments — from recruiting his staff
from the ranks of guys who have done time to turning Libya into
Thunderdome?

It's the tried and true Harperian formula. The question is: After almost a decade, do Canadians know a snake oil peddler when they see one?

Monday, October 13, 2014

The IMF recently released a report warning that the world economy is once again tipping towards recession. Why? Paul Krugman writes in today's New York Times:

The
proximate answer lies in a series of policy mistakes: Austerity when
economies needed stimulus, paranoia about inflation when the real risk
is deflation, and so on. But why do governments keep making these
mistakes? In particular, why do they keep making the same mistakes, year
after year?

The answer, I’d suggest, is an excess of virtue. Righteousness is killing the world economy.

The righteous believe that ordinary folks -- who are drowning in debt -- will have to pay for their sins. They also believe that those who led them there bear no responsibility for the mess they helped create. Put simply, the righteous believe in punishment, but not forgiveness:

As
I said, it’s about righteousness — the sense that any kind of debt
forgiveness would involve rewarding bad behavior. In America, the famous
Rick Santelli rant
that gave birth to the Tea Party wasn’t about taxes or spending — it
was a furious denunciation of proposals to help troubled homeowners. In
Europe, austerity policies have been driven less by economic analysis
than by Germany’s moral indignation over the notion that irresponsible
borrowers might not face the full consequences of their actions.

So
the policy response to a crisis of excessive debt has, in effect, been a
demand that debtors pay off their debts in full. What does history say
about that strategy? That’s easy: It doesn’t work. Whatever progress
debtors make through suffering and saving is more than offset through
depression and deflation. That is, for example, what happened to Britain after World War I,
when it tried to pay off its debt with huge budget surpluses while
returning to the gold standard: Despite years of sacrifice, it made
almost no progress in bringing down the ratio of debt to G.D.P.

It's obvious where the Harperites stand. Whether it's the economy, or justice, or international affairs, they stand four square for punishment. God, you see, is on their side.

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Last month, Finance Minister Joe Oliver announced the Conservatives job creation plan -- to cut Employment Insurance contributions to small businesses. Tom Walkom writes that the "plan" represented yet another attack on the Employment Insurance regime in Canada:

Under Oliver’s plan,
small-business owners will see their employment insurance premiums cut
by about 15 per cent over the next two years.

Lower payroll taxes, the finance minister said then, would encourage these small businesses to hire more workers.

Oliver’s claims were
supported by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, a lobbying
group, which said the measure would create about 25,000 person-years of
employment over an unspecified period.

This week the Parliamentary Budget Office released a cost-benefit analysis of Oliver's plan:

In a report released Thursday, it says that the two-year, $550-million tax break will produce only 800 net new jobs.

That works out to $687,500 per job.

There was another way to use Employment Insurance to create jobs:

Instead of lowering EI premiums overall (which, according to the
parliamentary budget office, would have created 10,000 net new jobs),
the government made a bow to its key small-business constituency.

But, as always the stated aim of the policy was not its real aim. Oliver was buying the votes of small business, not creating jobs. Nothing illustrates the corporate juggernaut better than what has happened to Employment Insurance in the last 25 years:

During the 1990s, Jean
Chrétien’s Liberals used the employment insurance surplus to pay down
the deficit and offer tax breaks to corporations.

When he took power,
Prime Minister Stephen Harper did much the same. In 2008, the EI fund’s
$57.2 billion surplus was quietly absorbed into general government
revenue.
Even now, the
Conservatives are reluctant to relinquish their hold on the EI windfall.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Apparently, many journalists -- including Andrew Coyne -- believe that Stephen Harper's decision to join the bombing brigades in Iraq is justified. Michael Harris believes that Harper's decision is folly and that the reaction to it illustrates "the slow collapse" of Canadian journalism. After all, when it comes to war in the Middle East, Harper has a record. That record includes not only his full throated campaign to join George Bush's invasion of Iraq, but also his support for military action in Libya:

Harper helped bomb Moammar Gadhafi out of power, even though regime
change was expressly excluded from the UN mandate. The prime minister
had his million dollar fly-over of the Parliament buildings to celebrate
his ‘mission accomplished’ moment. It was all downhill from there. The
dictator was not replaced by nation-building democrats, but by the armed
thugs of the Misrata militias. Since 2013, their accomplishments have
included ethnic cleansing and torture.

Libya is now so dangerous that not even the United Nations nor the U.S.
maintain a presence there. Harper never talks about Libya anymore — a
place he proudly bombed — except to say we’re not responsible for the
current chaos. But with the dust of the Libyan fiasco not yet settled,
Harper buys into a mission that is eerily like it. Canada will help bomb
another evildoer into the dust and save the day. Like we did in Libya —
for a cool $100 million.

You would think that, when journalists looked at the record, they would smell a rat. But Canadian journalists have endured the same fate as journalists everywhere -- and the ignorance which is a consequence of their fate:

Writing in The Guardian, reporter Anjan Sundaram offers a
theory to explain our shrinking knowledge, explaining along the way how
genocide in the Congo never quite got on the radar of Western editors:

“The Western news media are in crisis and are turning their back on
their world. We hardly ever notice. Where correspondents were once
assigned to a place for years or months, reporters now handle 20
countries each … As the news has receded, so have our minds.”

Harper thrives because, in his world, Ignorance is Strength. But in the real world, Harris writes, Harper is "a thundering bozo." When journalism fails, that's what we get for leaders -- thundering bozos.

Friday, October 10, 2014

It's fascinating to hear the Harper Party conflate its own self interest with the national interest. The latest example is a Tory proposal -- buried in an omnibus bill -- to change the Copyright Act so that "free use of news content" could be used in political ads.

The change would provide a treasure trove for those who produce attack ads. Tasha Kheiriddin writes:

What’s truly bizarre about this is that the Conservatives haven’t done
well with attack ads over the last couple of years. Every time they run
one, the Liberals seem to grow their lead in the polls. Nothing the
Tories have thrown at Justin Trudeau has stuck. He has a tendency to
trip over his own tongue; Canadians, it seems, just don’t care.

The proposed change once again illustrates the furniture which occupies Conservative head space. And Harper himself claims that the present situation represents a form of "censorship." Tim Harper writes:

If Harper has his way, his Canada in 2015 will include a media that
becomes an extension of the government, dutifully collecting news
footage that can be twisted and used for partisan purposes, then thrown
back as an ad at the network that covered the news in the first place.

It means that every reporter chasing a silent Conservative down the
halls of Parliament, every technical crew schlepping cameras and
microphones over to the Hill, every producer and editor putting together
a piece on the nightly newscast and every anchor introducing the
segment, is working not just for their network, but ultimately the
political war rooms of this country next year.

It means the government that makes a virtue of taking no free rides
and doing its own heavy lifting when it comes to bombing ISIS targets,
is only too happy to freeload off the backs of journalists, without
seeking permission or providing compensation.

Mark Twain once famously observed that, "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to." Stephen Harper really should blush. He needs to.

Thursday, October 09, 2014

There's going to be one. And, if the Harper government gets its way, it will go to tax cuts. That happened under the Liberals, too. Linda McQuaig writes:

The trick is to make surpluses disappear quickly by doling them out
in tax cuts — before there’s time for a serious national debate about
what the electorate actually wants to do with their money.
So when Ottawa started generating big surpluses in the late 1990s, it
quickly began slashing taxes — particularly on corporations and
high-income earners. As a result, Ottawa now collects about $50 billion
less in taxes per year than it would have if it hadn’t done all that
tax-cutting, according to labour economist Toby Sanger. That has
deprived governments of the revenue they’d need to provide the kind of
enhanced public programs many Canadians probably would like.

That's what right wing think tanks are advocating. The International Monetary Fund, however has suggested that now is the time to spend on infrastructure. Scott Clark and Peter Devries write:

“The time is right,” says the International Monetary Fund in its latest World Economic Outlook, “for an infrastructure push.”

“In many advanced economies,” says the report, “there is still
substantial slack … Robust demand momentum has not yet taken hold …
There are now worries that demand will remain persistently weak — a
possibility that has been described as ‘secular stagnation’.”

Yet the Harper government insists that the way to grow an economy is to create supply, not demand. Which raises the question, who was all this austerity for? Not for ordinary folks. Consider what has happen to medicare funding, writes McQuaig:

When medicare was established in the late 1960s, Ottawa covered 50 per
cent of the costs. Today, Ottawa contributes just 20 per cent — and this
will fall to a mere 12 per cent over the next few decades under the new health care funding formula unilaterally imposed on the provinces by the Harper government in 2011.

The money which used to fund medicare has gone into the pockets of the wealthy, a trend which will continue if the Harper government introduces income splitting:

This is, of course, exactly what the Harper government is planning to
do. It has promised to introduce income-splitting — a costly and deeply
unfair tax cut which would see almost all of the benefits go to
well-heeled families with stay-at-home mothers.

If you're a politician these days, it pays to look after the rich. they'll look after you in your retirement. The surplus benefits the wealthy and those who serve them.

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Paul Adams has an interesting piece this morning over at ipolitics. As of yesterday, Canada is now officially at war. Adams points out that, in the last twenty-five years, the United States has led five major wars in the Middle East. The only one that succeeded was the First Gulf War. It succeeded because Colin Powell thought very carefully about the situation before sending troops into the desert. What guided Powell was what has become known as the Powell Doctrine, which is best summarized in the answers to five questions:

Is the goal clear and important?

Is it a last resort after non-military efforts have failed?

Does the mission command the support of the American people and the international community?

Have the costs and expected gains been clearly analyzed?

Can the planned military mission achieve the intended political objectives?

Are the goals clearly circumscribed and is there a plausible exit strategy?

Adams writes that some thought has been given to answering the first two questions. But the rest of the answers -- particularly to questions 4 and 5 -- have been ignored:

Neither the Obama administration nor, for its small part, the Harper
government has been frank about the potential costs of the mission. I am
thinking now not just of the financial expense of an open-ended
mission. I’m also talking about blowback from the Muslim world — which
includes the implications of allying ourselves with the loathsome,
head-chopping Saudis and, if we are honest, Bashar Al-Assad’s Syrian
dictatorship. Not to mention the motley crew of Iraqi fighters who are
now our military avatars.

Nor do many people who know about these things think that the
military mission as it is now conceived — that is, bombing Islamic
State and supplying the ragtag forces of our new best friends on the
ground — can achieve its supposed aims. Stephen Harper, who seems so
pleased just to be on the team, may say the mission is to “contain”
Islamic State. But Obama, whose team it is, says the goal is to “eliminate” it.

We have entered a war without thinking about its long term consequences. When going to war, the standard advice is," Ready. Aim. Fire." We've got that advice backwards.

Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Jim Stanford writes that, by resurrecting Bill C-377, the Harper Party is making one last assault on labour. The bill died in the Senate last year when Conservative senators, led by the now retired Hugh Segal, revolted and refused to pass the bill because -- according to Segal -- it was "flawed, unconstitutional and technically incompetent."

The revived bill is still probably unconstitutional because "it almost certainly violates provincial constitutional authority and federal privacy standards." But whether or not a bill could pass constitutional muster has never been a Harperite concern. So the prime minister's minions plan to charge ahead.

But, Stanford writes, that strategy has been failing throughout the country:

In addition to the C-377 debacle, several other labour issues unfolded
badly for the Conservatives (and their provincial counterparts) in the
last year. Ottawa backtracked dramatically on its Temporary Foreign
Worker program in the face of public outrage – opposition led by unions.
In Ontario, PC leader Tim Hudak self-immolated in fiery anti-union
rhetoric. In B.C., Premier Christy Clark’s attempt to paint the
teacher’s union as public enemy number one backfired; she finally
withdrew (after a needless three-month strike) her plan to unilaterally
seize control over classroom sizes. Even in Alberta, the least unionized
province, new Premier Jim Prentice quickly abandoned two
confrontational (and likely unconstitutional) anti-union pension bills,
told by MPPs they were hurting badly in their constituencies.

As in so many other areas, the tide is turning against the Conservatives. Unions are increasingly being seen as:

an institutional bulwark on the side of all those who work for a living,
defending vulnerable people within a social order that is increasingly
lopsided. As unions succeed in that effort, the political value of
union-bashing will continue to erode.

Monday, October 06, 2014

After the Conservatives vote this afternoon to go to war, we will enter the annals of historical folly. Dishonesty and folly are Stephen Harper's hallmarks. They are present in everything he does. But his entry into Iraq is truly foolish, for several reasons. Michael Harris writes:

When Steve made his war announcement against the beheaders, there was
a strange addendum.

Although Canada would join the noble bomb-fest in
Iraq, there would be no bombing in Syria without the permission of the
leader of that country.

But the leader of that country is the same monster Steve wanted to
bomb only a few months back. Remember that guy, the one who used poison
gas to kill his own people? Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died
in that country’s civil war. So why does Steve need the permission of
the monstrous President Assad to save Scarborough from ISIS?

Besides the problem of asking his enemy's permission, Harper has created the problem of bombing people who could be his allies. How does he propose to distinguish between enemies and allies:

And then there is the small difficulty of identifying who to drop the
bombs on. For years, a deadly civil war has been raging inside Syria to
topple President Assad. Many factions are involved in the fight,
including some that are backed by the United States, and others that are
mortal enemies.

That is where the trouble starts. The U.S. backs the Free Syrian
Army. But it does not back and instead targets the Jabbat al-Nusra group
because of its alleged affiliation to al Qaeda. And that is a problem
because the Free Syrian Army sees Jabbat al-Nusra as a valued ally in
the fight against Assad. Remember that old
the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend thing?

Michael den Tandt writes that this is Harper's Churchillian moment. But there is a big difference between Harper and Churchill. Churchill was no fool.

Sunday, October 05, 2014

A month ago, Brian Mulroney took Stephen Harper apart on national television. This weekend, writing in the National Post, Conrad Black told Harper his fifteen minutes were up:

If Harper really, seriously, wants his government re-elected, he should
let it change leaders. That does not appear to be his pleasure and I
can’t blame a man for wanting to keep his job, but he must know that if
he doesn’t, his countrymen will be profoundly tempted to do it for him.
The only federal leaders in Canadian history to win four straight
elections were Macdonald and Laurier; the only person in any serious
democracy to do so in the last century was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Stephen Harper is distinguishable from them.

The polls keep telling Harper the same thing. But he keeps soldiering on -- literally -- into the sands of Iraq. Now Peggy Mason, Canada's former ambassador for disarmament to the United Nations, warns that Harper's hopping on the bombing bandwagon will make matters worse:

Stephen Harper and his allies are underestimating their opponents as a
bunch of religious extremists bent on spreading wanton mayhem and
terror. Islamic State may be brutally ruthless, but they know exactly
what they are doing.

Their core is made up of seasoned, motivated fighters and an
extremely experienced leadership that go back to the “dirty war” waged
by the American and British Special Forces in Iraq between 2006 and
2009.

ISIL is playing a strategical game of chess with its every move, while the West is playing military tic-tac-toe.

Mr. Harper has never been one to ask for advice. And it's clear he's taking none. But, as the chorus gets louder, it should be abundantly clear that the prime minister suffers from severe megalomania.

Saturday, October 04, 2014

Stephen Harper planned to win the next election on the economy and tax cuts. But his numbers have tanked for a year. And the latest EKOS poll reveals that the Liberals are where his was when he won his coveted majority. So a change of plan is in order. Ever the opportunist, Harper has found his issue: War. It's the ultimate wedge. Michael Harris writes:

But think about it for a moment. Does the U.S. really need the help
of military gnats like Estonia to deal with insurgents without an air
force? Does it really need Canada to kick the stuffing out of the bad
guys? Of course it doesn’t.

The coalition, of which Harper is eager to be a part, is merely a
P.R. ploy by Washington. A recent U.S. poll showed that when the air
strikes against ISIS are presented as America and its Western and Arab
allies working in concert, support for the mission in the U.S. is high
at 73 per cent. But when the air strikes are portrayed as a unilateral
American operation, support drops to 50 per cent.

Members of the coalition are merely helping President Obama to market
the war back home, just as lobbyists like Hill & Knowlton were paid
millions of dollars by the government of Kuwait to market the first
Iraq War in 1990.

The other way the war on ISIS is being marketed is through fear
mongering, this PM’s strong suit. Harper has worked up justifiable
revulsion at beheadings like James Foley’s into the nonsensical
proposition that ISIS represents a serious threat to Canadian security.
If ebola doesn’t get you, ISIS will.

Canada's six F-18's won't tip the balance. But they will provide Harper with a weapon to use against his opposition -- particularly Justin Trudeau. Ottawa, he will say, is a place for real men. And, he'll bring up Robert Borden, in whose footsteps he will claim to walk.

But Borden ran a Union government. That is not Harper's way. He has not consulted the opposition at all. Harris doubts that, his claims to the contrary, he consulted his cabinet:

The last nine years have proved that Stephen Harper is no economic genius. History will record that he was no military genius, either. But, for the next year, that is exactly what he will try to convince Canadians he is.

Friday, October 03, 2014

Stephen Harper tells us that there are lots of things we can't afford -- like veterans affairs offices, lawyers to check the proposed constitutionality of legislation, and home mail delivery. But last week we paid the tab -- $300,000 -- to fly two European representatives round trip to celebrate the Canada European Trade Agreement.

According to Harper government hype, routinely repeated uncritically
in the media, the trade deal will be a boon for all Canadians, boosting
our economy by $12 billion, generating 80,000 jobs and adding $1,000 a
year to the incomes of Canadian families.

For instance, they assume Canadian companies will sell as many
services in Europe as European firms do (despite being thousands of
miles away), and that Canadian firms will then invest these profits in
new capital here – even though Canadian firms have notoriously hoarded
profits in recent years rather than re-invest them. Yet this wildly
optimistic assumption about re-investment accounts for more than half of
the $12-billion economic boost.

As for job gains, well, the models actually showed productivity
gains, not job gains. But knowing the public has little interest in
something as esoteric as productivity gains, these somehow morphed into
more politically popular job gains, in a sleight-of-hand by government
spin-doctors that Stanford dubs “intellectually dishonest.”

Most far-fetched is the claim that the deal will boost the incomes of
Canadian families by $1,000 each. As Stanford notes, the government
simply took the $12 billion economic boost – a specious number at best –
and divided it by the number of Canadian families.

That last calculation is mind boggling. Our prime minister claims to be an economist. But he's obviously math challanged. The last Conservative minister who suffered from the same disability was Bev Oda. When she started ordering $16 glasses of orange juice, she disappeared.

What has Harper bought? He's bought a legal regime to protect investors from Canadian law:

This could mean, for instance, that if a future Canadian government
wanted to create a new public program – such as universal pharmacare or
national child care – it could face lawsuits from disgruntled European
firms objecting to the way the program limited their opportunities to
sell drugs or child care to Canadians.

Imagine the outrage if a Canadian government had negotiated a trade
deal that gave such an extensive set of rights to labour unions,
allowing disgruntled unions to sue the Canadian government for millions
of dollars. And then, to top it off, the government had spent $300,000
so that foreign officials could attend an exclusive soirée with Canada’s
“union bosses.”

Mr. Harper's is a proud Thatcherite:

Over the past 30 years, virtually all the gains of economic growth have
gone to the top 10 per cent of Canadian families. If this pattern of the
past three decades continues, there will be no gains from the trade
deal for ordinary Canadian families. Really only for the corporate
sector are the gains significant. Indeed, the trade deal is, above all, a
kind of constitution that enshrines corporate rights above the reach of
national laws, that is, above the reach of democratically-elected
governments.

During the last election campaign, Mr. Harper accused Michael Ignatieff of not coming back to Canada "for you." While it's true that Harper has always been here, it's clear that whatever he does, it's not "for you."

Thursday, October 02, 2014

Stephen Harper is going to war, believing it will help him get re-elected. Chantal Hebert writes that, in adopting the same rhetoric he used to support the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, he may speed up his departure:

In the House of Commons on Tuesday, the prime minister added that the U.S.-led intervention was “noble and necessary.”

As leader of the
Opposition a decade ago, Harper’s case for Canada’s participation in the
American-led coalition against Saddam Hussein was also essentially
based on the contention that the country had an absolute moral duty to
join its closest allies in a quasi-holy war.

Except that crusade did not work out well. It destabilized the entire Middle East and created the situation which has led Barack Obama back into a quagmire he sought to avoid. So far, the United States has actually built a coalition and has not engaged in shock and awe.

With their squeezed budgets, the truth is that the Canadian military can't do that much. The NDP appears to be opposed to the mission. The questions is, what will the Liberals do? Hebert writes:

From pipelines to
international trade, there is no lack of examples of general
Conservative policy directions upon which Justin Trudeau has been
content to stick a Liberal smiley face rather than chart a substantially
different course.

Up to a point, it is
an approach that makes strategic sense for — even as support for the
Conservatives is declining — a plurality of voters feel that the country
is headed in the right direction.

But in this instance,
substance matters more than style and holding a finger out in the air to
determine which way the public opinion wind is blowing is of little
use, for the history of military engagements suggests that initial
public and/or editorial enthusiasm is no guarantee of enduring support
or, for that matter, success.

Wednesday, October 01, 2014

Michael den Tandt writes that the apology Sun News issued this week to Justin Trudeau will go down in history as a superb example of insincere sincerity:

Having first suggested last week that Levant is not really a Sun News
journalist, but rather a mere comment contributor, the network saw fit
to broadcast its mea culpa via a voiced segment, in vintage
newscaster baritone, that aired just before Levant’s regular Monday
evening spot. The host himself did not apologize, or acknowledge the
apology in any way. It was as though, as far as he was concerned, it
hadn’t happened.

Like Paul Calandra's blubbering last week in the House of Commons, everyone knows that, behind the babble, there is no commitment to change:

Perhaps Levant threatened to quit rather than personally apologize? Or
maybe the network preferred not to force the issue. Either way, it is
now a given there will be future Levantist overreach, given this host’s
odd, almost fetishistic obsession with the Trudeau family, and the
federal election in the offing. No matter what tripe Levant spouts,
whether about the Roma or about a federal politician, Sun Media does not
withdraw his platform. Clearly, they love the guy.

Brian Mulroney reportedly insisted on the apology. But clearly there will be no attempt to change the organization's culture. In fact, nothing in Conservative culture has changed -- not for Levant, for Calandra -- or for the master of insincere sincerity -- the multiply apologetic Rob Ford.

But, den Tandt writes -- all indications to the contrary -- people are not stupid:

There is a reason why Levant is not taken seriously by many. There is
a reason why Calandra is now a punch line. There is a reason why Rob
Ford, before cancer took him out of Toronto’s mayoral race, was on track
to get booted from office, and it is simply that most people are not
idiots.

Despite every attempt by political professionals to purge a sense of
honour from our politics, the majority of individuals still possess an
instinct for truth. They still respond viscerally to its obvious
presence or absence. They still can spot insincerity for what it is. And
they are still predisposed, in a democracy, to punish politicians who
routinely play them for fools.

Which begs the question: How will Canadians react when Stephen Harper tells them that going to war in Iraq is a "noble" enterprize?

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.